Java, 3D programmers will work for stock options

For the football fans among you, there is absolutely no relation between my dear son Vermel and Dick Vermeil, the recently named coach of the St. Louis Random Access Memories. As you may have guessed, I'm not a fan of the gridiron; pigskin, for all I know, is a contraceptive. Still, I'm concerned that Vermel may be the target of name-stealing copycats in the future. Therefore, I'm rechristening the kid Vermel^tm to ward off thieves.

I wish I lived in a world without trademarks. Worlds, Incorporated wishes that it lived in world of more profits. My spies tell me that the 3D fantasy-land maker is hemorrhaging money and that employee cutbacks could be imminent.

Cutbacks may not have been the cause but some Netscape employees who joined the company when it acquired NetCode have bailed out, I hear. Maybe they decided to jump ship before Netscape stock slides even further into the deep. Who needs to be fully vested?

There's always work in Silly Con Valley though, especially if you're into porting microkernels to different hardware architectures. Be has posted word on its Web site that it's looking for a Kernel Engineer, no doubt to handle the dirty work of porting BeOS to the Intel architecture. It sounds to me like Jean Louis and Company are getting more serious about making sweet music with the Pentium. Does a Kernel Engineer have to know how to make popcorn? I'll take mine with no butter. You can grease the Information Superhighway to my heart by emailing me some rumors immediately.